Copaganda and the media

With cops freaking out about progressive prosecutors and fearing a backlash from protests about police abuse and excess, we're seeing a rash of copaganda being produced by the cops and credulously boosted by the media. Numerous threads on here have brushed against this issue, but it seems there should be a dedicated one to explore the issue directly.

A recent example of how respectable media uncritically lends their credibility to these tales of copaganda:

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Originally Posted by Alec Karakatsanis A new scandal is brewing at the New York Times. I try my best below to document the paper's corporate and police union copaganda, and to share actual evidence and research that the NYT ignores. The stakes are huge. Last year, I wrote about a NYT writer who didn't disclose he had worked for CIA, Palantir, and police or that he currently ran a consulting company that relies on "law enforcement" contracts. It was a shocking, unethical episode. Well, today, NYT had different reporter write basically same story and send it to entire NYT email list. Who was his main data source? **The same CIA/Palantir/Police analyst.** Again, the NYT calls that guy a "crime analyst" without reporting any of his conflicts of interest. Today's piece is, in many ways, worse. It is unethical faux-science suggesting that more police will make us safer. This is contrary to the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence, but you wouldn't know that from NYT. But it gets even more insidious.

It's a long thread, which is easier to read using threadreader.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1...374972931.html

The author details how the NYTimes uncritically lends its platform to "experts" who pass off what is, at best, heavily contested social science as established fact, or at worst is just total pseudoscientific bunk.

For example:

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Fourth, there are two main experts offered to give vague support for the article's main theses: that changes in policing caused murder and that the solutions are more punishment. The first source is a guy who pro-police journalists always seem to quote for the James Comey "Ferguson Effect" idea, in articles that don't offer any evidence, just his "opinion." NPR used same guy for same reason. His opinion here is impossibly vague. The "Ferguson effect" suggesting that reaction by police and public to civil rights protests somehow increases crime is like climate science denial. It was laughed at when Comey suggested it, and now it's offered as fancy pseudo-science in the New York Times.

it's worth a read. The conclusion:

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Setting aside the evidence in my thread above that police cause more crime than they prevent and instead use their budgets to brutally enforce inequality, every other comparable country in the world manages to have lower violence with less punishment. All that missing in NYT. This is, unfortunately, part of a long pattern of similar unethical, dangerous reporting in the NYT. Below are a few of the many threads I've done recently collecting some of these examples. At a time of rising authoritarian movements, we cannot let this keep happening.

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